This happens just frequently enough to be a familiar problem for us, but not frequently enough for the fix to stick in my mind!

Googling for the error messages yeilds a couple of mailinglist threads asking about this error and how to work around it – which were both started by my colleague Jonathan Gazeley the first time we hit the problem. [1]

There are no actual fixes in those threads, although one post did hint at the root cause being mcollective caching the result of the Dell API call – without actually stating where it gets cached.

Skip to the end, and page back until you get to the bit where it starts complaining about the warranty fact, and you find that it’s trying to open /var/tmp/dell-warranty-XXXXXXX.json where XXXXXXX is the service tag of the hardware.